12/16/08

"good guy"I'm appalled at the last-minute rule changes the Bush administration is pushing through. Most of them are aimed at weakening existing environmental and safety legislation.

On the other hand Oregon has a senator who's trying to make them accountable, and maintain the safety and quality of our lives I'd like to thank Ron Wyden for following up on the impact of the bad decisions at the Dept of Interior:

“Significant harm to the integrity of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the morale and reputation of the Fish and Wildlife Service as well as potential harm to individual species,” and the “untold waste of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars” are just some of the consequences of what the Interior Department’s Inspector General Earl Devaney terms one former Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald’s“zeal to advance her agenda.”General Devaney released these findings in a 141 page report detailing his office’s year-long investigation, initiated at the request of U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) who believed that 18 ESA decisions may have been tainted by Ms. MacDonald

“Why my office needed to request an Inspector General’s investigation to get this information is beyond me; but as usual, General Devaney’s work is not only beyond reproach, it gives Congress what is needed to take action,” said Wyden.“I believe that General Devaney’s exemplary service during what is unquestionably one of the darkest periods in the Interior Department’s history more than merits his being kept on in the Obama Administration to continue prosecuting the case.”

Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to weaken the ESA by directive, since they couldn't get enough support politically. The Pew charitable trust reports that one attack on the ESA will transfer responsibility for environmental impact reviews from federal employees (which requires public input) to advisory groups that represent regional fishing interests.Here's the proposed rule change which was sent to the OMB on Nov 4th.

For example, take the Minerals Management Service whose mission is to "manage the ocean energy and mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf and Federal and Indian mineral revenues to enhance public and trust benefits, promote responsible use, and realize fair value." If an official is considering a project that would yield huge energy benefits and please MMS higher-ups but would also decimate one or more endangered species and violate the law, what's a bureaucrat to do?

Another rule change is a similar case of the fox watching the hen house. RegWatch reports on a change that allows government agencies to make their own environmental assessments, rather than requiring independent scientific reviews. This would be as if we spread the "blind eye" attitude of Secretary McDonald horizontally across all regulatory agencies.

Jonathan Shradar, an agency spokesman, said Wednesday evening that the agency made the decision despite weeks of frantic work trying to complete the rules. The White House said months ago that no new rules should be imposed in the administration’s last days.

“We didn’t want to be faced with putting a midnight regulation in place,” Mr. Shradar said. “It was better to leave those incomplete rather than force something through.”

I guess when they say "last days" that really does mean... days. The plan was that all rules would be finalized before mid-November, but it appears things are still being juggled.

Born and raised in Hollywood, Forrie is the ultimate fan. He is still an eager 12-year-old boy trapped in a gangly, 86-year-old man's body. He delights in bad puns and very silly jokes. He points to a casket covered in embroidered pillows in the front of his living room. "That's my coffin table," he says with a wink. "Room for one more ... "He is well-spoken and a master storyteller. He has an encyclopedic mind that holds data like a computer. He can rattle off obscure movie titles, forgotten movie stars, esoteric movie lore. His stories are what make his objects, much of which look like junk in an adolescent's bedroom, come alive.There is Bela Lugosi's cape in the corner, from the 1932 stage performance of "Dracula" in San Francisco. And there, over the dining room doorway, are the seven great faces of horror cinema in life-size 3-D molds: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr., Tor Johnson, Glenn Strange, Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.Where others display china, Forrie displays models of dinosaurs, monster heads and a skull holding a serving bowl. Where others might hang paintings, Ackerman hangs a wall-size comic strip of Vampirella, which he created in 1958.

One item I didn't realize was that Ackerman is responsible for "discovering" Ray Bradbury. I'm reading "October Country" by Bradbury right now.

12/1/08

I finished my third effort at NaNoWriMo early yesterday morning -- the last day of November. NaNoWriMo is an event that asks you to write a 50,000 word novel during the month of November (thus: National Novel Writing Month). As Piers Anthony, author of 137 novels to date, says in one of NaNoWriMo's soi-disant Pep Talks (they are actual weekly emails):

You're a fool. You know that, don't you? Because only a fool would try a stunt as crazy as this. You want to write a 50,000 word novel in one month?! Do you have sawdust in your skull? When there are so many other more useful things you could be doing, like cleaning up the house and yard, taking a correspondence course in Chinese, or contributing your time and effort to a charitable cause? Whatever is possessing you?

and then continues a bit later...

So maybe you won't be a successful novelist, or even a good one. At least you are trying. T hat, would you believe, puts you in a rarefied one percent of our kind. Maybe less than that. You aspire to something better than the normal rat race. You may not accomplish much, but it's the attitude that counts. As with mutations: 99% of them are bad and don't survive, but the 1% that are better are responsible for the evolution of species to a more fit state. You know the odds are against you, but who knows? If you don't try, you'll never be sure whether you might, just maybe, possibly, have done it. So you do have to make the effort, or be forever condemned in your own bleary eyes.

My novel, called "The Zythophile", is about a young man and his quest to brew the perfect beer, and have someone recognize him for that effort. He goes to the World Beer Cup, which is held in Portland (in the novel) and gives it a shot, despite troubles with a terrorist chasing him, and the fact that the beer is alive.

You can read the first 8,000 words here.Ok, don't read the excerpt. That's good not to read it because it's really just a dump of my brain onto paper. Even I haven't read it, except for the previous couple of paragraphs each time I started to write. This is just a lump of granite. As Katherine Paterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia said in her Pep Talk:

I live in Barre, Vermont which calls itself the "Granite Capital of the World." Outside our town are enormous quarries, so when I speak in local schools every child has a mental picture of a granite quarry. "You know how hard it is to get granite out of the quarry," I say. "You have to carefully score the rock and put the explosive in to make the great granite block break loose from the face of the stone. Then you have to attach the block to the chains so that the cranes can lift it slowly out of the hole a nd put it on the waiting truck. That’s the first draft. It’s hard, dangerous work, and when you’ve finished, all you’ve really got is a block of stone. But now you have something now to work on. Now you can take your block down to the shed to carve and polish it and turn it into something of beauty. That’s revision."

Linda has started a blog of her craft projects. Here's part of her first entry:

The other day I went to Twisted on Broadway to take a class in Amigurumi, the art of crocheting super cute characters. (Also the name of the book we used). The instructions in our book were in Japanese, but the patterns were so visually oriented that it was easy to figure out what to do. Great for those who absorb information in that way.Linda Candello, Crafty Linda, Nov 2008

11/18/08

relating to Microsoft... or Google.My son asked me the other day how it was possible for Microsoft and Google to compete. He's in 6th grade, and he thinks of one company (MSFT) as a seller of operating systems, and one as a web search engine.

Probably a lot of CIOs are asking the same question because there was an article in CIO magazine called "The Business Case for Gmail in the Enterprise." The author compares the cost of buying, supporting and updating business apps that include e-mail, a calendar, document and spreadsheet programs, and instant messaging with moving to Google Apps, a web service version of the same apps that also includes a platform for wikis. Google Apps, which Google calls "software-as-a-service for business email, information sharing and security," is $50 per user per year, which is a huge savings over an enterprise version of Microsoft Office.

"The average cost of [enterprise] email is 8 dollars per month [per user]," he says. "For half that, we can get more value beyond just e-mail. We're getting Google apps and video for the enterprise. We're getting the ability to share spreadsheets and documents."

So, while Google's stock has dropped 50% over the past 6 months, it looks like their poised not only to take over the advertising "supply-chain," but also the business desktop platform.

11/14/08

This morning I cavalierly wrote about a couple who married, strayed and divorced all in Second Life. Now I find that my friend Allen is virtually married to someone than his wife. As Allen says...

We just like each other a lot and people in-world had begun to think of us as a couple because we’re both such dorks. So, we spent the 10 lindens to become partnered..This probably sounds dramatic and strange to most people but I’ve seen and heard of this sort of thing happening all the time in SL. People hook up at the avatar level, get “partnered” (10 linden dollars at the web page), maybe even have a blingy, poofy wedding in-world and then get divorced (for 25 linden dollars) a few weeks or months later.

Hey, Congratulations on your second wedding!

Really, my point wasn't that someone got married or divorced in Second Life, or that their actions may or may not be virtual echoes of their real lives (also called "RL" by Second Lifers). What I found interesting is that this whole world is running on a bank of computers, so a "god" could conceivably step in, replay what happened, parse the syntax of the situation, and judge one side or the other to be in the right. Of course, I know from experience that in RL things don't work that way. Maybe a malicious god could occasionally seize control of SL and force the participants to replay their past. Or a trickster god could rework the scenario, tossing in false memories and easter eggs. Who knows, maybe in the future a Network God will skim some of this off the Linden Labs servers, add a laugh track, and we'll watch it streamed over the Internet.

In the Nightmare on Elm Street movies the premise is that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life. What if you cheat on your spouse in your dreams? What if you virtually cheat on your spouse?

A woman is divorcing her real husband because she caught him cheating on her in the virtual world Second Life. She says that she saw her husband's avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute in their virtual bathroom.

Amy Taylor, 28, said she had caught husband David Pollard, 40, having sex with an animated woman. The couple, who met in an Internet chatroom in 2003, are now separated."I went mad -- I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

The couple met via Second Life, got married in the real world, and then also had a lavish virtual wedding. Now they're breaking up in both the real world and the virtual world. Is this confusing?

The husband says that he wasn't cheating.

Pollard admitted having an online relationship with a "girl in America" but denied wrongdoing. "We weren't even having cyber sex or anything like that, we were just chatting and hanging out together," he told the Western Morning News.

Seems like Linden Labs, who runs Second Life, could help him out by dumping the backups from that time and running a core analysis... or not.

Judge Jerome LaBarre said the city's annual World Naked Bike Ride -- in which as many as 1,200 people cycled through Northwest and downtown Portland on June 14 -- has helped cement riding in the buff as a form of protest against cars and possibly even the nation's dependence on fossil fuels.
LaBarre then cleared Michael "Bobby" Hammond, 21, of any wrongdoing after two days of hearings that concluded Wednesday.

Portland police said that Hammond's ride through the Alberta Arts District was a stunt, not free speech. They arrested Hammond, citing city code that states it's illegal to expose genitalia in a public place in view of members of the opposite sex.

For people who might complain about Portland's rowdy cyclists I have to remind you of a precedent. Lady Godiva rode naked through the streets of Coventry in England to protest the oppressive taxes imposed by her husband on his tenants. That event was over 1000 years ago and it's still well-known, so riding naked may not only be a well-established method of peacefully protesting, it's a good way to make a lasting statement.

11/12/08

A report just released by Portland's Office of Transportation shows that bicycle use in the city increased by double digits for the fourth straight year. On top of that, the city's 28 percent increase in overall bicycle use for 2008 was the biggest single-year increase since Portland began counting cyclists at various locations around the city in the early 1990s.

11/9/08

Nacho, as wonderful name...Trying to write a story and can't think of a good name? Too lazy to look in the Yellow Pages? Make the computer do it for you.

The Random Name Generator lets you choose gender, ethnic background, and even stereotypes such as Fairy, Goth, Rapper or Wrestler. If you're hooked on a given surname you can plug that in.

So, let's say for example, you're writing a sequel to Jack Black's "Nacho Libre." I click on wrestler, and get the following names: Rhino Snake Double Biceps and Cripple Sheik Iron Assassin.

Or maybe if the Obama family gets a new puppy they can use the generator to suggest names. I thought they might want to choose a Kenyan name in honor of Obama's father but they only have a category called "African." Using that, it suggested the name "Kibwe," which means means "blessed" in Swahili. You can click on the suggested name to get the meaning behind it.

Allow local law enforcement to engage in domestic spying without good cause

Erase catch limits on commercial scallop fishing

Ease rules meant to keep coal slurry waste out of the Appalachian streams

Allow natural gas pipelines to operate at higher pressures

Shift passenger security screening responsibilities from commercial airlines to the federal government

Change the way government agencies comply with the Endangered Species Act. The proposal would allow officials to approve development projects that could impact endangered species without consulting federal wildlife and habitat scientists

The last rule would allow current emissions at a power plant to match the highest levels produced by that plant, overturning a rule that more strictly limits such emission increases. According to the EPA's estimate, it would allow millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, worsening global warming.

Usually, when these rules take effect they are hard to undo. It requires new regulatory proceedings, including lengthy periods of public comment, drafting and mandated reanalysis. Except in the case of GWB. When he took office in 2001 his chief of staff issued a government-wide memo that blocked the completion or implementation of regulations drafted in the waning days of the Clinton administration that had not yet taken legal effect. That's why this administration is pushing so hard to get the new rules done before mid-November.

Of course, they're also trying to wait until after the elections, since that could hurt any Republicans by association...

Not too bad of a result. I only ran the ad in the state of Oregon, which kept some of the costs down. One drawback to my test was that Flat Out Press doesn't directly sell The Age of Hot Rods, so other than increased traffic to the website and one purchase of another book, I can't tell how well the advertising worked.

As you can see from the graphic (above) the Standard Edition is way more complex than the starter edition. You can run multiple ads, and you can have several variations of the same ad. With the Starter Edition of AdWords you could choose to show an ad for a state or a zip code, but that was it. Standard Edition can run an ad in more than one region, so I can choose to run the ad in the PDX zip code (97215) and also in the Seattle/Tacoma region. I could also run it for the whole state of Oklahoma if I wanted.

The cost per click (CPC) was something that concerned me. It cost almost a dollar every time someone clicked through to the website, whether they bought something or not. That can get expensive. I'd heard the the Standard Edition of google AdWords could help cut down the cost by allowing you to bid for your CPC. If you bid high, you get promoted higher in the search, if you're low, then you're lower, and might even drop to page 3 or 4.

The following graphic shows my bidding strategy for one ad campaign that's running in Oregon and the Seattle/Tacoma region.I've set most of the max CPCs to $.27. Some keywords are more expensive, so I've set the max bids on those higher. I'm hoping that through a combination of limiting CPC and more focused keywords I can drop the cost down to $.50 or $.70 per click.

10/29/08

The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format.This new, multiplatform strategy for the Monitor will "secure and enlarge the Monitor's role in its second century."

I guess this change is just part of the evolution of news. I still remember when the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal merged in 1982. That's why we have two full pages of comics in the Oregonian (1 page from the O, 1 page from the Journal). I also remember when Willamette Week changed to non-smearing ink, and then to soy-based ink. I don't remember when Sunday comics shrunk, but I have some old examples from the 30's, 40's and 50's where the pages are poster-sized. Now those were comics. Makes me think of Little Nemo in Slumberland (this is an execellent book)...

10/24/08

While we were visiting Japan we went to Sakushin Gakuin school in Utsunomiya. The kids we were with got to take part in a Tea Ceremony lesson. According to Wikipedia:

The Japanese tea ceremony is called chanoyu (茶の湯, lit. "tea hot-water") or also chadō or sadō (茶道, "the way of tea") in Japanese. It is a multifaceted traditional activity strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism, in which powdered green tea, or matcha (抹茶), is ceremonially prepared and served to others.

An instructor discourses on the finer points of the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Apparently he is a famous tea instructor. Our friend Hiroko thinks that she saw him on television.

You have to sit in this position for the duration of the ceremony.

The treats

Based on some of the kids' expressions, there was a mixed response to the treats

At this school only girls in 5th grade and up learn the Tea Ceremony. During this time the boys in the class go play rugby. But, because our kids were visiting the boys acted as guests and the girls served tea to them. Our boys, however, were on the girls' side making tea. One boy said that tea usually gives him a headache, but this tea was ok.

10/19/08

McCain: Meanwhile, they were getting all kinds of money in campaign contributions. Sen. Obama was the second highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history -- in history.

If you check out this fact, Obama has received $120,349 in political donations from employees of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. By contrast, McCain received $21,550. Please note that the money is coming from the employees of these quasi-governmental organizations.

Now the AP is reporting that Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse. This isn't any smoking gun because (a) I don't know what was in the bill, and (b) Freddie Mac was targeting only Republicans to vote against the bill since the democrats in congress were already against it.

But the suprising thing that comes out in the article is this: McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, or his lobbying firm has taken more than $2 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dating to 2000. In December, Freddie Mac contributed $250,000 to last month's GOP convention.

So, McCain is slamming Obama for taking FM's money, while accepting more than twice that during an event designed to elect him as president. Where's the straight talk in that?

10/16/08

AdWords is a way to place a small text-based ad next to the search results whenever someone uses your keywords in a google search. Google suggests a number of keywords based on the content of your ad. My product was "The Age of Hot Rods," with essays on Rods, Customs and Racing from the 1950s to today. You can see the ad in the left hand corner of the first picture, along with the keywords listed below.

The status screen here shows that my ad has appeared in google searches 16,784 times since last week. In addition to the google keyword searches, my ad showed up 15,339 times in google's "content network." I'm not 100% sure what that means, except the help says:

[Content network] shows how your ad performed on Google Network content sites relevant to your ad text and keywords.Clicks, impressions, and costs from the content network are not attributed to individual keywords. Instead, this data is compiled into the 'Content network' row you see here.

I chose to show my ad only within Oregon. Google bases your location on your ISP's address (physical, or by mapping the IP address, I don't know). AdWords suggested a variety of keyword categories, and I chose about 20 words each from two of the categories.

Here's the nut of AdWords: your ad can show up thousands of times, but you only get charged by the number of clicks. In the past week only 15 people have clicked through to my web site. When they do, I get charged based on (a) how popular my ad words are, and (b) how many people have viewed the ads. If I chose some really popular ad words, it would cost more to get my ad higher in the search window.

From my data, it seems like "street rod" might be a more popular search than "1950s". The 1950s key word yielded 729 impressions, and 7 clicks to flatoutpress.com. Google has charged me $5.17, which is $.74 per click or $.008 per impression. Meanwhile "street rod" has showm my ad 238 time, and received 3 clicks. This cost me $2.65, or $.83 per click and .011 per impression. Seems to me like I should focus my keywords more on 1950s, and less on "street rod."

I'm still not sure why I have keywords where my ad has never showed up. Maybe I have to allocate a larger ad budget to get a wider spread. But, I don't see how to prioritize certain keywords over others. I guess you do that by reducing the number of keywords.

Speaking of budget, google has done a good job of keeping my ad in play. They have an heuristic that shows your ad paired to keyword searches until you reach the limit of your budget per day. So, if I have a budget of $50 per month, that means I can ring up about $1.67 in charges per day. If I get more clicks than that, then the ad stops running for the day.

There are also a couple nice graphs to track advertising results:

You get "Clicks per day", "Impressions per day", and "Cost per day" as well as the option to download your data into a spreadsheet. I'm not sure what the graphs really represent to me. I mean, when the "Cost Per Day" goes down, that's because I'm not getting any clicks.

Anyway, I got one sale from the web site, so that covered most of the $50 expense. Maybe next month I'll try another ad next month.

(Ok, it's a little easier to take today after a record 11% gain in most of the broad indexes)

If you don't have access to the New Yorker, thanks to cartoonbank.com I've summarized all the cartoons here in the order they ran in the magazine. Also, if you have an iGoogle account you might want to add my "Random New Yorker Cartoon" gadget to your home page (it's way better than cartoonbank's widget).